Magisteria

Nicholas Spencer

As is frustratingly often the case with history, the truth is rather more complex and convoluted than the myths. Neither the specific encounters nor the master narrative hung from them turns out to be the morality play that has passed into the popular imagination.

Time and time again, it is the concept of the human – our makeup, origins, purpose, dignity and uniqueness (or lack thereof) – that emerges from the debate. Time and again, when it seemed as if people were arguing about the power of the planets, the composition of the body, the order of the cosmos, the design of nature, the origin of life, the age of rocks or the development of species, they were really talking about the nature of the human beast.

The real victim was not religion or even Catholicism but history, with the complex, colourful, ambiguous and hopelessly entangled histories of science and religion reduced to a single narrative of uniform conflict.

Nobody found or lost God on account of relativity or quantum theory. For all that the new physics adjusted the foundations of reality, few imagined that it brought the religious house down, if only because there was no longer one built above it. Newton had famously claimed that he had had his eye on how his system might work ‘with considering men for the belief of a Deity’, but after the work of Laplace and the fall of Paley, no one based their religion on Newtonian physics. And that meant that when physics was remodelled in the early twentieth century, there were no religious beliefs or doctrines built on it that could come crashing down.

Maoism

Julia Lovell

Maoism is an unstable political creed that simultaneously reveres centralised party and mass leadership, collective obedience and anti-state rebellion. In its global journeys, Maoism has served causes that questioned or attacked existing governments; in its country of origin, it has created an omnipotent party state. It has lionised peasant revolution, while winning many of its followers or sympathisers from educated elites (Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Baburam Bhattarai, Abimael Guzmán) – it has been a revolution spread through books.

The consolidation of the PRC coincided with a global upsurge in decolonisation across Africa, Asia and the Middle East in the wake of the Second World War. That context did not exist for the Soviet Union’s own anti-imperial ventures in the 1920s. Even though nationalists in, for example, Indonesia had already authored their own strongly anti-colonial movements in the 1920s and 30s, and even though at no point in its history did the CCP contribute as much materially to global anti-colonial rebellions as the Soviet Union – which also funnelled millions of roubles per year, in addition to military aid and training, to the Chinese revolution during the 1920s alone – this historical coincidence enabled the PRC under Mao to present itself as the global headquarters of anti-imperialism.

Though discredited today, the domino theory gave a fairly accurate account of Chinese Communist ambitions in Indochina. Confidential conversations between Chinese and Vietnamese leaders from the 1950s to the 1970s turned regularly to an overarching project of world revolution. The horror of the Vietnam War was explicitly justified because, in Zhou Enlai’s words, it wasp fought ‘for the world revolution’ as well as for Vietnam. It was, in China’s view, a key domino whose fall would have ramifications for the rest of Asia.

While the culture and politics of Cultural Revolution China permeated Western radicalism during the 1960s and 70s, this remains one of the significantly under-told stories of this epochal moment of cultural revolution. Mao and his ideas of continuous, peasant revolution appealed to both left-wing rebels, and civil rights campaigners. Within Europe, Mao’s Cultural Revolution galvanised Dadaist student protest, nurtured feminist and gay rights activism, and legitimised urban guerrilla terrorism. In the United States, it bolstered a broad programme of anti-racist civil rights campaigns, as well as sectarian Marxist–Leninist party-building.

Since the West began engaging in concerted outreach towards China – with the sixteenth-century launch of missionary overtures – the ‘celestial empire’ has been viewed by churchmen, merchants and philosopher-intellectuals as a potent dreamland of near-paradisiacal opportunity: for Christian conversion, for economic profit, for lessons in government. The embrace of Maoism by Western radicals is therefore a recent repeat of an age-old predisposition towards identifying conveniently remote, exotic China as a repository of political, social, cultural and economic virtue. The Cultural Revolution fever of the 1960s and beyond once more showcased the ability of Westerners to create an imaginary China largely divorced from empirical reality.

Mao-style criticism/self-criticism later blurred into the confessional habits of therapy and self-help. The Cultural Revolution-inspired dissent of the 1960s and 70s contributed to reforms of secondary and higher education, to make teaching methods and curricula more participatory, more representative, more accountable to diverse communities. African or Chinese American activists who stayed in the educational system rather than joining radical parties, contributed to the struggle for black and ethnic studies in universities.

The Cultural Revolution’s rhetoric of anti-authoritarian rebellion inspired revolts outside China that took aim at a broad range of political, cultural and social custom: at domestic and foreign policy; colonial rule; electoral representation; relations between the sexes; education, film and literature. The impact of the Cultural Revolution (upper case) is part of a much more diffuse (and often liberalising) process of cultural revolution (lower case) that has transformed society, culture and politics since the 1960s, especially in the developed West. In countries riven by deep historical, ethnic or socio-economic fault (post-fascist Germany and Italy; post-segregation America; post-independence India), the Cultural Revolution’s legitimisation of political violence served as the spark that lit a prairie fire – a fire that in some instances is still burning today.

Across the Latin American left as a whole, Mao’s analysis of pre-revolutionary China resonated in a continent marked by inequality and US economic domination. Mao’s China was lionised as a state that had broken with Western dependence and bid for self-sufficiency through the economic miracle of the Great Leap Forward.

Mao was never purged from PRC politics. The Soviet Union could discard Stalin and still have Lenin as revolutionary founder; the CCP only had Mao.

Mao, his strategies and political model remain central to the legitimacy and functioning of China’s Communist government. For decades, Western analysts have been too quick to overlook or dismiss the persistent influence of the Maoist heritage in contemporary China. In this book, I have argued that Maoism has been underestimated not just as a Chinese but also as a global phenomenon. I have sought to re-centre its ideas and experiences as major forces of the recent past, present and future that have shaped – and are shaping – the world, as well as China.

The story of Maoism’s international travels reveals also the PRC’s repertoire of global interventions. It undermines the historical orthodoxy – propagated by China but widely accepted in the West – that Mao-era China had no engagement with the world beyond its borders.

Perhaps we should get used to the contradictions of Maoism. It looks like they will be with us for some time yet.

Medieval Christianity

Kevin Madigan

No other service was so treasured as the monks’ capacity to pray for society. Monks were imagined by those who founded and supported them as a sort of spiritual militia; they fought against the society’s spiritual enemies, especially the archenemy Satan and his minions. Above all, donors of land and buildings expected that monks would satisfy for the sins they committed against God by their prayers. Punishing penances could be satisfied not by the sinner but by his surrogate, the monk; he performed by his liturgical prayers the penances accumulated by lay sinners.

The essential work of the monks, from the point of view of the society that supported them, was intercessory prayer. A donor who endowed a monastery could be assured that no matter the enormity of his transgressions, regardless of the weight of sin he had accumulated, his penance would be “prayed down” by a community he founded, a community all then believed would exist in perpetuity. An institution that in Benedict’s time was isolated and profoundly disinclined to offer service to surrounding communities, one that concentrated on the supernatural aspirations of its monks, came to offer both civic and spiritual benefits without which early-medieval society found it could not live.

Although a few bishops and some synods in the early Middle Ages insisted on clerical continence, their words were a dead letter. Simply put, virtually no rural parishioner or priest in the year 1000 regarded clerical concubinage or marriage as practically or canonically objectionable; it would be more than a century before this would change and we begin to have evidence of reforming lay groups demanding clerical celibacy. Given the difficulties of rural life, the economic motivations for having a wife, and the peasant origins of the clerical clergy, it was doubtless the case that celibacy was thought by many to be too lofty an ideal; some were probably even unaware that clerical concubinage or marriage was uncanonical. Additionally, the indifference or ignorance of parishioners and priests was reinforced by a regime of imperfect episcopal supervision, not to mention that the practices around clerical education and formation were barely adequate, and to describe them as such is being charitable.

Part of medieval culture was a dynamic interaction between elements of the Christian faith sponsored by priests and those given life or popularity by the people. In attempting to understand medieval Christianity, we stray far from the truth if we imagine priests and people as inhabiting two different worlds of thought and practice or if we believe that the experience of ordinary medieval folk can be captured in the vocabulary of folklore and with the social scientific tools used to describe it today.

The model of the ancient church and the “life of the apostles” (vita apostolica) were increasingly not just influential or suggestive. More and more, they were understood to be normative. As such, they superseded any practice that was regarded as merely customary or temporarily useful; evolution from ancient conventions slowly became seen as evidence of degeneration from treasured, pristine ideals, archetypes that the church ought, in the eyes of reformers, to embrace again. Reform was largely imagined, then, in terms of a restoration of usages that were imagined to have prevailed as disciplinary, ecclesiastical, moral, and legal norms in the apostolic age.

It was Dominic’s genius to perceive that no preachers could compete against the Cathars unless they could effectively preach, so to speak, as orthodox perfects. The conviction that learning, poverty, and fairly traditional monastic observance could prepare preachers for this task, combined with the profound confidence that heresy was intolerable for the church—and mortally dangerous to souls—gave Dominic’s new order its initial shape and mission, as well as many of its enduring features.

The differences between monastic and scholastic education can be, and have been, exaggerated. We need to remember that even those schools in cities were for clerics training for ordination. Almost needless to say, all “believed in” and serviced the Deity. No scholastic ever claimed to have invented a portion of revelation. Rather, he worked within the very framework of the deposit of faith and attempted, by the strict application of reason, to understand it more profoundly. In other words, in ways that may seem backward to some today, he sought to understand what he already knew to be so. Belief preceded understanding; the latter clarified and reinforced the former.

The domination of both spiritual and temporal realms was to prove costly, in every way, to the papacy. Secular authorities never accepted the papacy’s claims to temporal oversight. In the ecclesiastical realm, as popes increased their power, they also caused suspicion and frustration among the faithful. As popes claimed more and more authority and acquired more power over Christendom and as the curia became a sort of Supreme Court of Christendom, the successors of St. Peter, ever in need of more money, resorted to a tactic hated in the Middle Ages more than today: taxation. In many other ways, the papacy was believed to have departed from apostolic practice. These deviations from normative practice and the fathomless need for revenue slowly robbed the papacy of affection and respect, with profound consequences in the centuries to come.

The papacy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries began increasing taxes and fees for existing services and charging more and new taxes. Traditional papal revenues included income gained from papal landed estates and a number of other, relatively minor, sources, including Peter’s Pence, a small annual tax; tributes from monasteries under the protection of St. Peter; and so forth. The point of no return came when the papacy began to tax the income of the clergy. Initially, it did so to pay for the Crusades. Later, these funds were used indiscriminately, and the rates at which the clergy could be taxed were equally promiscuous. Finally, the tax went from being an occasional impost to becoming a general tax, from which the papacy derived a dependable stream of revenue by the mid-thirteenth century. There is some grim irony in contemplating that when it came to taxing its main constituency, the papal government was far ahead of its secular counterparts.

Popes in the century between ca. 1430 and 1530 concentrated their efforts on protecting their Italian domain and in lavishly reconstructing the city of Rome. It is not for nothing that these pontiffs are often called “Renaissance popes.” Posterity owes to them at least the glory of the Sistine Chapel and, more ambiguously, the construction of the new St. Peter’s Basilica. But it seems these popes were constantly enmeshed in war; Italian politics; conflict with the city-states; trafficking in ecclesiastical offices; elevating their relatives (including their children, of whom one pope sired sixteen) to high office; and in the generation and accumulation of art and treasure.

No matter how much one confessed, it was impossible to say if one was in a state of grace and justified in the eyes of God. Far from offering relief, the salvific instrumentalities of the late-medieval church could have encouraged hypersensitivity and doubt. In the end, what one group of Christians could feel as consolation, another could feel as anxiety-causing torment and, finally, un-Christian. When Christians split over this issue—on how they might be saved—when the same set of Christian practices and pastoral pieties could generate diametrically opposite emotional and religious responses; when one Christian, emerging from the confessional, could feel serene relief and another near-immediate doubt, the Christian Middle Ages can be said to have come to an end. It was profound disagreement over the issue of the media and mechanism of salvation, then, that did much to sunder the religious unity of the medieval Western church.

Medieval Europe

Chris Wickham

Many writers about the middle ages have been preoccupied with the origins of those ‘nation’-states, or with other aspects of what they see as ‘modernity’, and for them it is these outcomes which give meaning to the period. This for me is seriously mistaken. History is not teleological: that is to say, historical development does not go to; it goes from. Furthermore, as far as I am concerned, the medieval period, full of energy as it was, is interesting in and for itself; it does not need to be validated by any subsequent developments.

The Christian laity, whether or not they were well informed about the details of doctrine, and whether or not they were prepared actually to follow clerical exhortations, particularly over such deeply held attitudes as those concerning honourable violence or sex, did indeed accept that religion was important, and indeed all-pervasive.

The self-servingness of much medieval religious rhetoric, particularly when it was the work of the powerful, can often be only too obvious to us; but it was not hypocritical. It might, sometimes, be more palatable (to us) if it had been; but such people, in almost every case, really did believe what they were saying. We have to factor that real belief into every assessment of medieval political action, however carefully and cunningly targeted.

When we are faced with really big events – the end of European peace in 1914, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 – historians tend to divide between those who see the catastrophe as inevitable, with structural causes, often long-term ones, which just happen to come together in a sudden shift, and those who see it as chance, the product of short-term, almost casual, political decisions; or else, when they are more nuanced, between those who, in the mélange of structural and political causes, put more weight on the former or else the latter.

The culture of the public, assembly politics, Christianity and the network of bishops, a disappearing tax system and the beginning of the politics of land, a less wealthy aristocracy and a more independent peasantry, a simpler economic system: all these features marked out the post-Roman kingdoms. So did a landed army run by no-longer-civilian aristocrats, which meant that aristocratic values became highly militarised from them on, and remained so for the rest of the middle ages and beyond.

As with the end of the western Roman empire, the Arab conquests have been viewed by much western scholarship through a veil of moralisation, about the failure of civilisation and the imperial project, and the triumph of barbarism.

They have also been seen though the lens of Orientalism: this was the moment when the eastern and southern Mediterranean ceased to be part of a common civilisation with the northern coasts, and became an Other, full of incomprehensible intrigue and harsh and repetitive – indeed, essentially meaningless – changes of régime, under a harsh sun.

It was also only too easy for Christian polities to see Muslim ones as existential threats, and sometimes they acted on that imagery, as, most dramatically, at the time of the crusades; and it was certainly much harder for the Christian polities to learn from the Muslim ones, even when there was much to learn. We have to recognise this difference, while not being taken in by it.

Up to the eleventh century, kings – and also regional rulers, dukes, counts and bishops – could rule from the top down, using the old Roman imagery of public power and the early medieval collective legitimation which was assembly politics, without considering in a very organised way what was going on locally, unless it involved disloyalty, or an injustice which was so clamorous that it actually reached their ears. The small-scale lordships of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries in France could not afford to be so detached; exactly whom they controlled, and how, mattered much more.

It is often still thought that an active exchange economy needs coins. This is not true; credit is enormously important in most exchange systems, then as now, and debt-credit agreements can be complicated without any physical money changing hands at all. The medieval economy worked on credit to a very large extent, indeed.

The strength of local, cellular, politics, plus the extension of literate practices to ever-wider social groups, plus a continuing high-equilibrium economic system, plus a newly intrusive state, made possible by taxation, communications and, once again, literacy, helped to create political systems across Europe which allowed engagement, nearly everywhere. This marks the last century of the middle ages, not the supposedly late medieval features which mark so many textbooks: crisis, or anxiety, or the Renaissance, or a sense that the continent was, somehow, waiting for the Reformation and European global conquest. And it is one of the main elements that the medieval period handed on to future generations.

On the Origin of Time

Thomas Hertog

Ever since Galileo and Newton, physics has been based on a dualism of some sort, in that it has relied on a fundamental separation between two distinct sources of information. First, there are the laws of evolution, mathematical equations that prescribe how physical systems change in time from one state to another. Second, there are boundary conditions, a concise description of the state of a system at a given moment in time. The laws of evolution take that state and evolve it, either backward or forward in time, to determine what the system was like at an earlier moment or what it will be at a later moment. It is the combination of the laws of evolution and the boundary conditions that yields the framework for prediction on which physics and cosmology pride themselves.

The picture suggested by the Standard Model of particle physics, applied in the melting pot of the hot big bang, is that the universe wasn't born with the values of the particle masses and force strengths that we have today. Instead these are properties of a broken-symmetry state that only congealed when the universe expanded and cooled. This is a profound insight. It tells us that in the very earliest stages of cosmic expansion some of the basic structure of the physical laws co-evolved with the universe they governed.

It is one of the most surprising features of quantum mechanics that the experimenter's observing and measuring enter explicitly in the process of prediction.

A quantum universe constantly puts itself together, piece by piece, out of a haze of possibilities, somewhat like a forest emerging out of the fog on a damp gray morning. Its history is not how we usually think of history, as a sequence of one thing happening after another. Rather it is a marvelous synthesis that includes us and in which what unfolds now retroactively shapes what was back then. This top-down element gives observers, in the quantum sense, a subtle creative role in cosmic affairs. It imbues cosmology with a delicate subjective touch. We — in our observership — are quite literally involved in the making of cosmic history.

Our Cosmic Habitat

Martin Rees

Our universe could have turned out to be an anarchic place, where atoms and the forces governing them are bafflingly different elsewhere in the cosmos from those we can study locally. But atoms in the most distant galaxies seem identical to those in our laboratories. Without this simplifying feature, we would have made far less progress in understanding our cosmic environment.

Twentieth-century physics rests on two great foundations: the quantum principle (governing the “inner space” of atoms) and Einstein’s relativity theory, which describes time, outer space, and gravity but doesn’t incorporate quantum effects. The structures erected on these foundations are still disjoint. Until there is a unified theory of the forces governing both cosmos and microworld, we won’t be able to understand the fundamental features of our universe: these features were imprinted on it at the very beginning, when everything was so squeezed that quantum fluctuations could shake the entire universe.

Astronomy and cosmology have a high profile and a positive image, in contrast to the ambivalence with which the public perceives, for instance, genetics or nuclear science. The essence of the new discoveries and concepts in these cosmic sciences can be conveyed, free of technicalities, to a wide general audience. I am uneasy, however, about the media’s portrayal of the subject: all too often, claims are hyped up, only to be retracted later, with the retraction usually being more subdued. When this happens, it is often the scientists themselves (or their press offices) who are at fault, not the journalists: indeed, journalists may soon become as skeptical of some researchers as they routinely are of politicians. Exaggerated claims about cosmology plainly are not as damaging as, for instance, misleading reports about medical research that raise false hopes of miracle cures. But it is in the cosmologists’ own interest to avoid hype. If we claim too often to make breakthroughs that overthrow all previous ideas, we’ll surely lose even the credibility that we deserve. Cosmologists thus should not blur the distinction between what is well established and what is conjectural. Otherwise there are two downsides. On the one hand, flaky ideas may gain undue credence: on the other hand, robust skeptics, realizing that parts of the subject are indeed still speculative, may fail to appreciate that other parts are firmly battle tested.

Paris 1919

Margaret MacMillan

In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided— in the parlance of modern bureaucrats, lessons learned.

Some of the most intractable problems of the modern world have roots in decisions made right after the end of the Great War. Among them one could list the four Balkan wars between 1991 and 1999; the crisis over Iraq (whose present borders resulted from Franco-British rivalries and casual mapmaking); the continuing quest of the Kurds for self-determination; disputes between Greece and Turkey; and the endless struggle between Arabs and Jews over land that each thought had been promised them.

For six months in 1919, Paris was the capital of the world. The Peace Conference was the world’s most important business, the peacemakers its most powerful people. They met day after day. They argued, debated, quarreled and made it up again. They created new countries and new organizations. They dined together, went to the theater together, and between January and June, Paris was at once the world’s government, its court of appeal and its parliament, the focus of its fears and hopes. Officially, the Peace Conference lasted into 1920, but those first six months are the ones that count, the key decisions were taken and the crucial chains of events set in motion. The world has never seen anything quite like it and never will again.

People said at the time, as they have ever since, that the peacemakers took too long and that they got it wrong. It has become a commonplace to say that the peace settlements of 1919 were a failure, that they led directly to the Second World War. That is to overestimate their power.

There were two realities in the world of 1919, and they did not always mesh. One was in Paris and the other was on the ground, where people were making their own decisions and fighting their own battles.

American exceptionalism has always had two sides: the one eager to set the world to rights, the other ready to turn its back with contempt if its message should be ignored.

Faith in their own exceptionalism has sometimes led to a certain obtuseness on the part of Americans, a tendency to preach at other nations rather than listen to them, a tendency as well to assume that American motives are pure where those of others are not. And Wilson was very American.

It was easy to mock Wilson, and many did. It is also easy to forget how important his principles were in 1919 and how many people, and not just in the United States, wanted to believe in his great dream of a better world. They had, after all, a terrible reference point in the ruin left by the Great War. Wilson kept alive the hope that human society, despite the evidence, was getting better, that nations would one day live in harmony. In 1919, before disillusionment had set in, the world was more than ready to listen to him.

The survivors of the Great War were weary and anxious. Apparently solid structures, empires, their civil services and their armies, had melted away and in many parts of Europe it was not clear what was to take their place. Europe had been a place of unsatisfied longings before the war—of socialists hoping for a better world, of labor for better conditions, of nationalists for their own homes—and those longings emerged again with greater force because in the fluid world of 1919 it was possible to dream of great change—or have nightmares about the collapse of order.

It is hard today to imagine that such a project could have been taken seriously. Only a handful of eccentric historians still bother to study the League of Nations. Its archives, with their wealth of materials, are largely unvisited. Its very name evokes images of earnest bureaucrats, fuzzy liberal supporters, futile resolutions, unproductive fact-finding missions and, above all, failure: Manchuria in 1931, Ethiopia in 1935 and, most catastrophic of all, the outbreak of the Second World War a mere twenty years after the first one had ended.

Although historians are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the burden was never as great as Germany and its sympathizers claimed, reparations remain the preeminent symbol of the peace made in Paris. While most of the 440 clauses of the Treaty of Versailles have long been forgotten, the handful dealing with reparations stand, in what is still the received view, as evidence of a vindictive, shortsighted and poisonous document.

It is easy with hindsight to say that the victors should have been less concerned with making Germany pay and should have concentrated more on getting Europe going again. But after a war that had brought destruction on such a scale and shaken European society so deeply, how could political leaders speak of forgetting? In any case, public opinion would simply not allow them to do so.

Like so many of the other deals that haunted the Peace Conference as unwelcome guests, Sykes-Picot was made in the midst of the war, when promises were cheap and the prospect of defeat very real.

Britain and France paid a price for their role in the peace settlements in the Middle East. The French never completely pacified Syria, and it never paid for itself. The British pulled back in Iraq and Jordan as quickly as they could, but they found they were stuck with Palestine and an increasingly poisonous atmosphere between Arabs and Jews. The Arab world as a whole never forgot its betrayal and Arab hostility came to focus on the example of Western perfidy nearest at hand, the Zionist presence in Palestine. Arabs also remembered the brief hope of Arab unity at the end of the war. After 1945, those resentments and that hope continued to shape the Middle East.

With different leadership in the Western democracies, with stronger democracy in Weimar Germany, without the damage done by the Depression, the story might have turned out differently. And without Hitler to mobilize the resentments of ordinary Germans and to play on the guilty consciences of so many in the democracies, Europe might not have had another war so soon after the first. The Treaty of Versailles is not to blame. It was never consistently enforced, or only enough to irritate German nationalism without limiting German power to disrupt the peace of Europe.

The peacemakers, however, had to deal with reality, not what might have been. They grappled with huge and difficult questions. How can the irrational passions of nationalism or religion be contained before they do more damage? How can we outlaw war? We are still asking those questions.

Russia's War

Richard Overy

It is difficult to write the history of the war without recognizing that some idea of a Russian 'soul' or 'spirit' mattered too much to ordinary people to be written off as mere sentimentality, however mundane or banal or brutalizing was the real day-to-day experience of war.

The Age of Revolution 1789-1848

Eric Hobsbawm

The great revolution of 1789–1848 was the triumph not of ‘industry’ as such, but of capitalist industry; not of liberty and equality in general but of middle class or ‘bourgeois’ liberal society; not of ‘the modern economy’ or ‘the modern state’, but of the economies and states in a particular geographical region of the world (part of Europe and a few patches of North America), whose centre was the neighbouring and rival states of Great Britain and France. The transformation of 1789–1848 is essentially the twin upheaval which took place in those two countries, and was propagated thence across the entire world.

The revolution which broke out in the first months of 1848 was not a social revolution merely in the sense that it involved and mobilized all social classes. It was in the literal sense the rising of the labouring poor in the cities—especially the capital cities—of Western and Central Europe. Theirs, and theirs almost alone, was the force which toppled the old régimes from Palermo to the borders of Russia. When the dust settled on their ruins, workers—in France actually socialist workers—were seen to be standing on them, demanding not merely bread and employment, but a new state and society.

The conviction of the progress of human knowledge, rationality, wealth, civilization and control over nature with which the eighteenth century was deeply imbued, the ‘Enlightenment’, drew its strength primarily from the evident progress of production, trade, and the economic and scientific rationality believed to be associated inevitably with both. And its greatest champions were the economically most progressive classes, those most directly involved in the tangible advances of the time: the mercantile circles and economically enlightened landlords, financiers, scientifically-minded economic and social administrators, the educated middle class, manufacturers and entrepreneurs.

Absolute monarchy, however modernist and innovatory, found it impossible—and indeed showed few signs of wanting—to break loose from the hierarchy of landed nobles to which, after all, it belonged, whose values it symbolized and incorporated, and on whose support it largely depended. Absolute monarchy, however theoretically free to do whatever it liked, in practice belonged to the world which the enlightenment had baptized féodalité or feudalism, a term later popularized by the French Revolution. Such a monarchy was ready to use all available resources to strengthen its authority and taxable revenue within and its power outside its frontiers, and this might well lead it to foster what were in effect the forces of the rising society. It was prepared to strengthen its political hand by playing off one estate, class or province against another. Yet its horizons were those of its history, its function and its class. It hardly ever wanted, and was never able to achieve, the root-and-branch social and economic transformation which the progress of the economy required and the rising social groups called for.

No innovation of the Industrial Revolution has fired the imagination as much as the railway.

No other invention revealed the power and speed of the new age to the layman as dramatically; a revelation made all the more striking by the remarkable technical maturity of even the very earliest railways.

The iron road, pushing its huge smoke-plumed snakes at the speed of wind across countries and continents, whose embankments and cuttings, bridges and stations, formed a body of public building beside which the pyramids and the Roman aqueducts and even the Great Wall of China paled into provincialism, was the very symbol of man’s triumph through technology.

Only states waging limited campaigns with established regular forces could hope to keep war and domestic affairs in watertight compartments, as the ladies and gentlemen in Jane Austen’s novels were just then doing in Britain. The [French] Revolution waged neither a limited campaign nor had it established forces: for its war oscillated between the maximum victory of world revolution and the maximum defeat which meant total counterrevolution,

In the course of its crisis the young French Republic discovered or invented total war: the total mobilization of a nation’s resources through conscription, rationing and a rigidly controlled war economy, and virtual abolition, at home or abroad, of the distinction between soldiers and civilians. How appalling the implications of this discovery are has only become clear in our own historic epoch. Since the revolutionary war of 1792–4 remained an exceptional episode, most nineteenth-century observers could make no sense of it, except to observe (until in the fatness of later Victorian times even this was forgotten) that wars lead to revolutions, and revolutions win otherwise unwinnable wars. Only today can we see how much about the Jacobin Republic and the ‘Terror’ of 1793–4 makes sense in no other terms than those of a modern total war effort.

The statesmen of 1815 were wise enough to know that no settlement, however carefully carpentered, would in the long run withstand the strain of state rivalries and changing circumstance. Consequently they set out to provide a mechanism for maintaining peace—i.e. settling all outstanding problems as they arose—by means of regular congresses. It was of course understood that the crucial decisions in these were played by the ‘great powers’ (the term itself is an invention of this period). The ‘concert of Europe’—another term which came into use then—did not correspond to a United Nations, but rather to the permanent members of the UN’s Security Council.

This secularism of the revolution demonstrates the remarkable political hegemony of the liberal middle class, which imposed its particular ideological forms on a much vaster movement of the masses. If the intellectual leadership of the French Revolution had come only very slightly from the masses who actually made it, it is inconceivable that its ideology should not have shown more signs of traditionalism than it did.

The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge

Maurice Mandelbaum

When one take into account the interplay of general and special histories, and the fact that although sequential, explanatory, and interpretive inquiries are diverse in form they cannot exist in complete isolation from one another, the anatomy of historical knowledge reveals a unity of purpose and a unity of method: to understand the concrete nature of societies, the changes they have undergone, and the cultural products they have produced.

The Fabric of the Cosmos

Brian Greene

Space and time capture the imagination like no other scientific subject. For good reason. They form the arena of reality, the very fabric of the cosmos. Our entire existence — everything we do, think, and experience — takes place in some region of space during some interval of time. Yet science is still struggling to understand what space and time actually are.

To Isaac Newton, space and time simply were — they formed an inert, universal cosmic stage on which the events of the universe played themselves out. To his contemporary and frequent rival Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, "space" and "time" were merely the vocabulary of relations between where objects were and when events took place. Nothing more. But to Albert Einstein, space and time were the raw material underlying reality. Through his theories of relativity, Einstein jolted our thinking about space and time and revealed the principal part they play in the evolution of the universe. Ever since, space and time have been the sparkling jewels of physics. They are at once familiar and mystifying; fully understanding space and time has become physics' most daunting challenge and sought-after prize.

A magnetic field provides a magnet what an army provides a dictator and what an auditor provides the IRS: influence beyond their physical boundaries, which allows force to be exerted out in the "field". That is why a magnetic field is also called a force field.

Speculating about the future of science is an entertaining and constructive exercise. It places our current undertakings in a broader context, and emphasizes the overarching goals toward which we are slowly and deliberately working. But when such speculation turns to the future of spacetime itself, it takes on an almost mystical quality; we're considering the fate of the very things that dominate our sense of reality.

Just as you may seek a second opinion to corroborate a medical diagnosis, physicists, too, seek second opinions when they come upon data or theories that point towards puzzling results. Of these second opinions, the most convincing are those that reach the same conclusion from a point of view that differs sharply from the original analysis. When the arrows of explanation converge on one spot from different angles, there's a good chance that they're pointing at the scientific bull's-eye.

There would be nothing more poetic, no outcome more graceful, no unification more complete, than for us to confirm our theories of the ultra-small - our theories about the ultramicroscopic makeup of space, time, and matter - by turning our most powerful telescopes skyward and gazing silently at the stars.

The Fate of Africa

Martin Meredith

Although Africa is a continent of great diversity, African states have much in common, not only their origins as colonial territories, but the similar hazards and difficulties they have faced. Indeed, what is so striking about the fifty-year period since independence is the extent to which African states have suffered so many of the same misfortunes.

In 1948 Afrikaner Nationalists came to power bearing their own version of racial rule they called apartheid, determined to ensure white supremacy for all time and to destroy the swart gevaar, the black peril they said white society faced. Stage by stage, the black population was subjected to a vast array of government controls and segregated from whites wherever possible. Every facet of their life – residence, employment, education, public amenities and politics – was regulated to keep them in a strictly subordinate role. In the name of apartheid, more than three million people were uprooted from their homes to satisfy government planners; millions more were imprisoned for infringing apartheid regulations. There was no pretence about the objective.

The honeymoon of African independence was brief but memorable. African leaders, riding the crest of popularity, stepped forward with energy and enthusiasm to tackle the tasks of development and nation-building; ambitious plans were launched; bright young men went quickly to the top. Expectations were high; the sense of euphoria had been raised to ever greater heights by the lavish promises of nationalist politicians campaigning for power, pledging to provide education, medical care, employment and land for all.

Political systems too were recent transplants. Africans had little experience of representative democracy – representative institutions were introduced by the British and the French too late to alter the established character of the colonial state. The more durable imprint they left behind was of authoritarian regimes in which governors and their officials wielded enormous personal power. The sediment of colonial rule lay deep in African society. Traditions of autocratic governance, paternalism and dirigism were embedded in the institutions the new leaders inherited.

The most difficult task facing Africa’s new leaders was to weld into nations a variety of different peoples, speaking different languages and at different stages of political and social development. The new states of Africa were not ‘nations’. They possessed no ethnic, class or ideological cement to hold them together, no strong historical and social identities upon which to build. For a relatively brief period, the anti-colonial cause had provided a unity of purpose. Nationalist leaders had successfully exploited a variety of grievances among the urban and rural populations to galvanise support for the cause. But once the momentum that they had achieved in their drive for independence began to subside, so other loyalties and ambitions came thrusting to the fore.

Stage by stage, African leaders accumulated ever greater personal power, spreading the tentacles of their control into the further reaches of society. They preferred to rule not through constitutions or through state institutions like parliament but by exercising vast systems of patronage. Parliaments, where they survived, were packed with supporters, chosen for their known obedience. Government bureaucracies were staffed by party loyalists. Trade unions and farmers’ organisations were subordinated to the interests of government. The press existed merely as an outlet for government propaganda. Political debate became a matter of platitudes and praise-songs, no longer taken seriously.

It was often said that, because of the internal tensions and rivalries afflicting most African states, only strong government could provide the stability they needed to develop and prosper. Yet in practice, strong governments of the kind employed in Africa – whether personal dictatorships or one-party systems – rarely ensured either political stability or effective administration. Once in power, African leaders became preoccupied with staying in power, employing whatever means were necessary.

Given the array of adversities that Africa faced at the time of independence, the advances made in the two decades after 1960 were remarkable.

Despite the eruption of military coups, civil strife and political instability, a sense of optimism about Africa’s future prevailed throughout the 1960s. It was still spoken of as a continent with vast potential. The economic record, though not fulfilling earlier hopes, showed modest progress.

By the 1980s a mood of despair about Africa had taken hold. No other area of the world aroused such a sense of foreboding. The sum of its misfortunes was truly daunting. In relentless succession, African states had succumbed to military coups and brutal dictatorships, to periods of great violence and to economic decline and decay. One by one, African leaders had failed to deliver effective programmes to alleviate the plight of their populations. The vast majority of Africans enjoyed neither political rights nor freedoms. More than two-thirds were estimated to live in conditions of extreme poverty. The future was spoken of only in pessimistic terms.

So steep was Africa’s economic decline during the 1980s that it became known as ‘the lost decade’. In one country after another, living standards plummeted. By the mid-1980s most Africans were as poor or poorer than they had been at the time of independence. Crippled by debt, mismanagement and a collapse in tax revenues, African governments could no longer afford to maintain proper public services. Roads, railways, water, power and telephone systems deteriorated; schools, universities and hospitals were starved of funds; scientific facilities and statistical offices became early casualties. At every level the capacity of governments to function was fast diminishing. A drastic erosion of civil service salaries wrecked what was left of the morale, honesty and efficiency of civil servants.

Africa, by the end of the 1980s, was renowned for its Big Men, dictators who strutted the stage, tolerating neither opposition nor dissent, rigging elections, emasculating the courts, cowing the press, stifling the universities, demanding abject servility and making themselves exceedingly rich. Their faces appeared on currency notes; their photographs graced offices and shops. They named highways, football stadiums and hospitals after themselves. Their speeches and daily activities dominated radio and television news and government newspapers. They packed the civil service with their own supporters and employed secret police to hunt down opponents, licensing them to detain, torture and murder at will, if necessary.

In the early 1990s, when the ruling Hutu clique faced growing political opposition, they sought to maintain their hold on power by rousing Hutu against the Tutsi threat, fomenting a climate of fear and hatred, relying on the Hutu’s culture of obedience to ensure their orders were obeyed and preparing for the onslaught well in advance by arming militias and organising death squads. The genocide that followed was caused not by ancient ethnic antagonism but by a fanatical elite engaged in a modern struggle for power and wealth using ethnic antagonism as their principal weapon. Though Western governments knew that massive killing was underway, they failed to take the steps needed to prevent it. The result was slaughter on a scale not witnessed since the Nazi extermination programme against the Jews.

Mbeki’s determination to back a brutal African dictator, rather than stand up for human rights, followed a long tradition by leaders in Africa of turning a blind eye to the nefarious activities of their peers for the sake of group solidarity. It won him support in Africanist circles in South Africa who celebrated Zimbabwe’s example of giving the whites a good kicking and hoped for something similar in South Africa. But it caused apprehension among foreign investors, nervousness among the white population and aroused further misgivings about Mbeki’s commitment to democratic values. Moreover, it sullied the reputation of the ANC, which had received so much help in its own struggle for human rights and now remained indifferent to the struggle that others in the neighbourhood faced.

However much foreign aid is pumped into Africa – whether from China or from the West – it provides no lasting solution. For the sum of Africa’s misfortunes over the past half-century – its wars, its despotisms, its corruption, its droughts, its everyday violence – presents a crisis of far greater magnitude. At the core of the crisis is the failure of African leaders to provide effective government. Few countries have experienced wise or competent leadership.

After decades of mismanagement and corruption, most African states have become hollowed out. They are no longer instruments capable of serving the public good. Indeed, far from being able to provide aid and protection to their citizens, African governments and the vampire-like politicians who run them are regarded by the populations they rule as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival.

The First World War

John Keegan

The First World War inaugurated the manufacture of mass death that the Second brought to a pitiless consummation.

The First, unlike the Second World War, saw no systematic displacement of populations, no deliberate starvation, no expropriation, little massacre or atrocity. It was, despite the efforts by state propaganda machines to prove otherwise, and the cruelties of the battlefield apart, a curiously civilised war.

Yet it damaged civilisation, the rational and liberal civilisation of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse and, through the damage done, world civilisation also. Pre-war Europe, imperial though it was in its relations with most of the world beyond the continent, offered respect to the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law and representative government. Post-war Europe rapidly relinquished confidence in such principles.

There was, admittedly, a fear of war in the abstract, but it was as vague as the perception of what form modern war itself might take. Stronger by far, particularly among the political classes in every major country, was the fear of the consequences of failure to face the challenge of war itself. Each – Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary – felt its position threatened in some way or other.

The Invention of Science

David Wootton

Modern science was invented between 1572, when Tycho Brahe saw a nova, or new star, and 1704, when Newton published his Opticks, which demonstrated that white light is made up of light of all the colours of the rainbow, that you can split it into its component colours with a prism, and that colour inheres in light, not in objects. There were systems of knowledge we call ‘sciences’ before 1572, but the only one which functioned remotely like a modern science, in that it had sophisticated theories based on a substantial body of evidence and could make reliable predictions, was astronomy, and it was astronomy that was transformed in the years after 1572 into the first true science. What made astronomy in the years after 1572 a science? It had a research programme, a community of experts, and it was prepared to question every long-established certainty (that there can be no change in the heavens, that all movement in the heavens is circular, that the heavens consist of crystalline spheres) in the light of new evidence. Where astronomy led, other new sciences followed.

But since 1572 the world has been caught up in a vast Scientific Revolution that has transformed the nature of knowledge and the capacities of humankind. Without it there would have been no Industrial Revolution and none of the modern technologies on which we depend; human life would be drastically poorer and shorter and most of us would live lives of unremitting toil. How long it will last, and what its consequences will be, it is far too soon to say; it may end with nuclear war, or ecological catastrophe, or (though this seems much less likely) with happiness, peace and prosperity. Yet although we can now see that it is the greatest event in human history since the Neolithic Revolution, there is no general agreement on what the Scientific Revolution is, why it happened – or even whether there was such a thing. In this respect the Scientific Revolution is quite unlike, for example, the First World War, where there is general agreement on what it was and a fair amount of agreement on why it happened. An ongoing revolution is a nuisance for historians: they prefer to write about revolutions that happened in the past – when, in reality, this one is still continuing all around us.

To a certain degree, if the world is orderly and predictable, it is because we have worked to make it so by developing technologies that give us control over nature. If we can model its processes, it is because we have developed our own capacities for making nature-like artefacts. It was therefore inevitable that the advocates of the experimental method in the seventeenth century would come to insist that the universe is like a clock, for clocks are embodiments of the principles of order, regularity and efficiency and, moreover, it is we who have made them. If we think of God as a clockmaker, then we can be confident that he will have made a world amenable to experimental enquiry. In the Middle Ages the heavens had been compared to clockwork; now the same principle of regularity was, it was claimed, to be discovered in the sublunary world.

We do not just live with the technological benefits of science: the modern scientific way of thinking has become so much part of our culture that it has now become difficult to think our way back into a world where people did not speak of facts, hypotheses and theories, where knowledge was not grounded in evidence, where nature did not have laws. The Scientific Revolution has become almost invisible simply because it has been so astonishingly successful.

The King's Two Bodies

Ernst Kantorowicz

Mysticism, when transposed from the warm twilight of myth and fiction to the cold searchlight of fact and reason, has usually little left to recommend itself. Its language, unless resounding within its own magic or mystic circle, will often appear poor and even slightly foolish, and its most baffling metaphors and highflown images, when deprived of their iridescent wings, may easily resemble the pathetic and pitiful sight of Baudelaire’s Albatross. Political mysticism in particular is exposed to the danger of losing its spell or becoming quite meaningless when taken out of its native surroundings, its time and its space.

Infinite cross-relations between Church and State, active in every century of the Middle Ages, produced hybrids in either camp. Mutual borrowings and exchanges of insignia, political symbols, prerogatives, and rights of honor had been carried on perpetually between the spiritual and secular leaders of Christian society. The pope adorned his tiara with a golden crown, donned the imperial purple, and was preceded by the imperial banners when riding in solemn procession through the streets of Rome. The emperor wore under his crown a mitre, donned the pontifical shoes and other clerical raiments, and received, like a bishop, the ring at his coronation. These borrowings affected, in the earlier Middle Ages, chiefly the ruling individuals, both spiritual and secular, until finally the sacerdotium had an imperial appearance and the regnum a clerical touch.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Paul Kennedy

The relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies and of the technological and organizational breakthroughs which bring a greater advantage to one society than to another.

There looms today a tension between a nation’s existence in an anarchic military-political world and its existence in a laissez-faire economic world; between on the one hand its search for strategic security, as represented by its investment in the latest weapon systems and in its large-scale diversion of national resources to the armed forces, and on the other hand its search for economic security, as represented by an enhanced national prosperity, which depends upon (which in turn flows from new methods of production and wealth creation), upon increased output, and flourishing internal and external demand—all of which may be damaged by excessive spending upon armaments. Precisely because a top-heavy military establishment may slow down the rate of economic growth and lead to a decline in the nation’s share of world manufacturing output, and therefore wealth, and therefore power, the whole issue becomes one of the balancing the short-term security afforded by large defense against the longer-term security of rising production and income.

The Secular Enlightenment

Margaret Jacob

The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement of ideas and practices that made the secular world its point of departure. It did not necessarily deny the meaning or emotional hold of religion, but it gradually shifted attention away from religious questions toward secular ones. By seeking answers in secular terms—even to many religious questions—it vastly expanded the sphere of the secular, making it, for increasing numbers of educated people, a primary frame of reference.

Between 1500 and 1700, Westerners discovered two new worlds: one in the heavens, the other on earth. These discoveries coincided with and helped further a vast expansion of commerce that brought yet more peoples and places into the Western orbit. Celestial and terrestrial space were reconfigured. Making sense of these monumental discoveries required new thought and language.

Therein lay the roots of the Enlightenment: the unintended consequence of commercial and state-sponsored expansion. Paradoxically, as the power of absolute monarchies and the clergy that supported them grew in Europe—augmented as they were by global conquest—inventive responses to new spatial realities multiplied. Their combined weight secularized space and removed not only its boundaries but also its supernatural powers. They undermined belief in heaven and hell and the authority of absolutist regimes.

The intellectual and cultural shift described as the Enlightenment happened in only one century, and as such may be described as rapid for its time. The “for its time” part is the hardest for twenty-first-century people to understand.

The enlightened expansion of time could, however, be divorced from its materialist underpinning. The pious might believe that biblical stories of creation serve not as literal truth but as metaphors for a process that had actually taken many millennia. Yet materialism had enormous implications with staying power, and every believer in the Judeo-Christian tradition would—at some time—have to confront it. Materialist assumptions became the philosophical moorings upon which an entirely secular understanding of life and time rested.

One way of imagining the complex issue of temporal secularization would be to imagine a lessening of anxiety, of watchfulness about time in relation to salvation. For moderate Protestants in early modern England, time presented a paradox and therefore a source of anxiety. Regardless of how defined, by calendars or seasons, by feasts or fairs, time needed to be watched; its waste was to be scorned, its fruitful use, valued. The actions or motions that the pious take in the world had to be monitored for their virtuousness and made purposeful, and all actions had temporal consequences.

Then as now, the political has often been personal. Seekers after alternatives to absolute monarchies and their churches filled civil society, dwelt in its cafés, coffee houses, salons, eating clubs, and lodges. There they could find the like-minded, or the pugnacious, even the outrageous and the subversive. Not least, their shelves offered free newspapers and journals. The century ended with revolutions—Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, Belfast, Dublin, Naples—that focused minds on making new institutions, new laws, new hopes and dreams. All of them in this world, in time to be lived.

Wonderful Life

Stephen Jay Gould

We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives (and even of most events that, in retrospect, seem crucial to our fortunes or our history). We therefore retell actual events as stories with moral messages, embodying a few limited themes that narrators through the ages have cultivated for their power to interest and to instruct.

All interesting issues in natural history are questions of relative frequency, not single examples. Everything happens once amidst the richness of nature. But when an unanticipated phenomenon occurs again and again—finally turning into an expectation—then theories are overturned.

Our most precious hope for the history of life, a hope that we would relinquish with greatest reluctance, involves the concepts of progress and predictability. Since the human mind arose so late, and therefore threatens to demand interpretation as an accidental afterthought in a quirky evolutionary play, we are incited to dig in our heels all the harder and to postulate that all previous life followed a sensible order implying the eventual rise of consciousness. The greatest threat lies in a history of numerous possibilities, each sensible in itself after the fact, but each utterly unpredictable at the outset—and with only one (or a very few) roads leading to anything like our exalted state.

We value innovation and discovery—quite rightly, of course. Therefore, our genealogy of intellectual progress becomes a chronological list of precursors, people with hot ideas validated by later judgment—even if these scientists enjoyed no influence whatever during their lifetime, and had no palpable impact upon the practice of their profession.

This curiously prospective style of assessment excludes from later consciousness those powerful scientists who in their own time dominated a field, and may have shaped a hundred careers or a thousand concepts, in the service of conventional views later judged incorrect. But how can we grasp science as a social dynamic if we forget these people? How can we sharpen our proper focus upon lonely innovators if we ignore the dominating context of their opposition?

Most of us are not naive enough to believe the old myth that scientists are paragons of unprejudiced objectivity, equally open to all possibilities, and reaching conclusions only by the weight of evidence and logic of argument. We understand that biases, preferences, social values, and psychological attitudes all play a strong role in the process of discovery. However, we should not be driven to the opposite extreme of complete cynicism—the view that objective evidence plays no role, that perceptions of truth are entirely relative, and that scientific conclusions are just another form of aesthetic preference. Science, as actually practiced, is a complex dialogue between data and preconceptions.

A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result. This final result is therefore dependent, or contingent, upon everything that came before—the unerasable and determining signature of history.

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universe—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximal freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.

Worldmaking in the Long Great War

Jonathan Wyrtzen

The conventional 1914–1918 World War I bracket is limited by two entwined biases that distort our overall understanding of the conflict and warp it in specific ways with respect to the Middle East. The first is a bias toward a judicial definition of wartime that is bookended by the dates of formal declarations, armistices, and treaties carried out by recognized state actors. Using this shorthand occludes complicated realities of continuing violence and political fluidity that extend beyond those dates. The second bias is a myopic privileging of the beginning and ending of hostilities in a single theater of the war to periodize the whole of the conflict. In this case, fixating on the Western Front diverts attention from what was happening in the conflict’s other interconnected maritime and overland theaters, minimizing the true interregional scope of World War I.

By tracing out how the Long Great War unmade political worlds and served as the crucible in which new political worlds were imagined and put in motion, this book’s alternate narrative has shown that the new map of the modern Middle East was not imposed but reshaped over time as rival colonial and local clashed violently into the 1920s and 1930s. States, identities, and spatial boundaries were transformed through war, not a peace settlement.

The Sykes-Picot myth primes us presuppositionally with an intuitive Edenic counterfactual in which “natural” borders could have been drawn but were transgressed. The implicit assumption is that some sort of primordial post-Ottoman ethnonational communities in fact existed and were spatially bounded, and, by extension, that the colonial and local actors had fixed ideas and preferences that were diametrically opposed. This ignores the historical record, traced throughout this book, of colonial and local actors repeatedly recalculating and reimagining new political futures, with adjusted social and physical boundaries, based on opportunity contexts that shifted as competing projects came into conflict and new facts on the ground were established.

What the European colonial powers did wrong was to repeatedly, persistently, and violently intervene, shaping the region’s political institutions by buttressing authoritarian colonial state structures whose legacies continue to impact the modern Middle East. In sum, if you are going to assign blame, don’t blame the borders—blame the politics and political systems colonial powers crushed or reinforced within the borders.

It is important to not veer too far toward naively idealizing the self-determining political futures that “might have been” across the region. History rarely offers up black and white stories with clear good and bad guys; the Long Great War framework, which itself contains multiple counterfactuals to the Sykes-Picot narrative, shows us how much the making of the modern Middle East is a study in greys.

But, in finally forgoing the myth that the region’s "Fall" is because of the original sin of imposed, artificial borders, we can see that the Middle East is neither perpetually cursed by the Great War legacy nor think that its salvation lies in either external powers or local actors simply redrawing these boundaries. The deeper issue is political. Being able to see how new worlds were created in the Middle East in the Long Great War helps us see that they can be reimagined and remade now and in the future—and therein lies hope.